CSS Maintainability – Serious Style Sheets

Simon Willison brought up the fact that now that Slashdot has gone totally CSS in their website design and layout, that CSS has now gained respectability. He brings up a good point:

What’s needed is a well understood set of techniques for writing maintainable stylesheets. I’m interested in collecting advice on this, especially from people who have tackled this problem in a situation where more than one person has to work on the same CSS code. I’m particularly interested in ideas on how to best split up a large set of rules over multiple stylesheets.

His invitation brought out the forces and I thought you might be interested in what they have to say.

Basically, they all say the same thing. The best way to develop maintainable CSS style sheets is to keep them clean, structured, organized in groups, and make sure that the HTML/XHTML architecture structure is fully loaded with tons of style references to you can precious control the look of your site into the future, working only from the style sheet. The portfolio from CSS Zen Garden is a prime example of how a solidly built site architecture template can move with the changes in the CSS of a site.